


Watch Me Be Reborn [THROAM ficlet]

by Anna (arctic_grey)



Series: The Heart Rate of a Mouse [9]
Category: Bandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 05:44:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8044615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arctic_grey/pseuds/Anna
Summary: This is from the archives: Sisky's notes. I wrote this when I was writing the first half of Vol.3 back in the day, and I'd forgotten about it until I was reminded of its existence earlier. No reason to hoard it, and some of you might enjoy it, so here you go!It was never finished, but it tells you a bit about Sisky's adventures and where he was coming from. xx





	Watch Me Be Reborn [THROAM ficlet]

  
**Watch Me Be Reborn**

_Interview #177: November, 1978_  


It’s incredible, really, how one man can change the course of your life, how there are people that just radiate something extraordinary, people who are not like _us_ , a part of Picket Fence America. He said that in an interview once: ‘Picket Fence America’. But it’s the truth – there are over four billion people in the world today, and we eat and we sleep and we love and we lose, and we lead these meaningless, minuscule lives that do not change anyone else’s. That have no impact.

But then there are _them_. Men who can walk into the room and change the way everyone speaks and acts and thinks. Men who are unique. Ingenious. Special.

Ryan Ross is one of those people.

I am not.

Ryan Ross sits across from me, smoking nervously and shooting irritated glances my way as I try to organise my notes, hands trembling, taking in calming breaths. I try to act professional. I’ve talked to musicians before, I’ve talked to _that_ group of musicians before, all year, and yet I am terrified, stumbling on my words.

Ryan Ross is waiting, and I try to impress him. Say something smart.

Ryan Ross is waiting. But let’s talk about me for a minute.

Just for a second.

* * *

In 1958, the country was in recession but still launching satellites into space. The Cold War was in full swing, the revolution in Cuba was ongoing right on our doorstep, and later my roommate in college also told me that the Chinese were starving in 1958, but they’re commies so we’re not really expected to care about them much.

I was born that year.

Hattie, my nanny when we could still afford one, told me that my first favourite song was _All I Have to Do is Dream_. You know, The Everly Brothers song. It was a big hit in 1958. Hattie said that one night she was trying to get me to sleep, cradling me in her thick arms, but I wouldn’t stop crying. And in a moment of desperation, she started singing.

I paused. Took a breath. And smiled.

That’s what Hattie said.

So it was always in my bones, in my blood. Somehow. Looking at my pedigree, you wouldn’t really think so: businessmen marrying the daughters of businessmen. I wasn’t born silver spoon in hand, but we kept moving into bigger houses throughout my childhood until the mess with the IRS. I never forgot that I was no senator’s son, and my classmates never let me forget it either, and when I got sent to a public school, the kids there never let me forget that I could have been a senator’s son. I was always the odd one out. Alienated. That was alright. All I needed was a friend or two, and that I had.

I come from a line of oddballs. Jerzy Siska left his hometown of Sosnowiec in 1858, an exact hundred years before I was born. He met a lovely Polish girl from Szczawnica on the ship and married her once they had shaken off their sea legs. They moved to New Jersey because my great great grandfather thought it was fate somehow: Jerzy looked a lot like Jersey. The pronunciation, I’ve been told, is nothing similar. I don’t know a word of Polish myself. Jerzy Siska, I think, was a bit of a romantic.

My family’s fortune cannot be credited to any great ideas on Jerzy’s part. He was stingy as hell. He saved up and saved up, but on the positive side, this meant that his more resourceful friends turned to him as a potential investor. Jozefa, my great great great grandmother, persuaded Jerzy to spend his money on something. “You can’t take it to heaven with you,” she always used to say.

Or, well, so I’ve been told, though I no longer remember by whom, so maybe I made that bit up.

When Jerzy died, his oldest surviving son – my great great grandfather Stanislaw, Stan to his American friends – took over what proved to be a decent network of investments: fishing in Alaska, cotton markets in Oklahoma, and most importantly Stan invested in an insane automobile enterprise by some guy called Ford.

Yeah. It was the Ford investment that first gave my family a break.

It’s New Year’s Eve, 1899. Turn of the century. Celebrations, some talk of the world ending (like you always get in significant times like these) and the Siska family is making sure not to tell anyone back home of their sudden good fortune so that they are not expected to share. The Poles are considerate like that.

Stanislaw had two children. One of them died at childbirth. One of them didn’t: my great grandfather Filip. Stan was tough on Filip because his father had been tough on him. It’s a family tradition, and you don’t go breaking those. Filip’s first son Theodore was born in 1924, bang in the middle of the swinging twenties. Theodore didn’t think much of the tough regime Filip had inherited from his widower father. That’s how you get me.

Because one day Theodore Siska, after a hard day’s work and a sherry, made love to my mother, Louisa Siska, who had no Eastern European blood in her at all but Texan with dashes of English, and as they grinded against one another in the dark – making sure they didn’t enjoy it too much, of course – something went very wrong.

I was conceived.

It was a dark and stormy night in January 1958 – Ah, I’m just fucking with you. It was dark, but not stormy, I don’t think.

But I was born. And instead of giving me some awkward name I’d spend my entire life spelling – like Franciszek or Grzegorz – Father took one look at me and named me Adam. My father’s a very Christian man, after all: the first man. The symbolism of it and all that jazz. And I seemingly was no different from the other members of the Siska family. I strolled around our bigger and bigger houses, saying, “Yes, father,” and “Certainly, mother”, trying very hard to pretend our ancestry of simple Polish farmers didn’t exist, no, no, we were well-off Americans with a big black car and a big black nanny, disowning our past and heritage.

But I was no longer a traditional Siska. Father kissed me goodnight and Mother chose spending time with me over cocktails parties. Not _all_ the time, but Mother had that Southern maternal instinct in her in those days when we were still a family.

I was happily detached from the world, attending the private school meant for snobs that Father insisted I go to, and he had plans of money for me and of me taking over the business – what else would I do? But still, I was always curious. Looking up into the clouds, beyond the high gates of the school, singing, “All I have to do is dre-e-e-e-eam, dream, dream, dream,” but I had none of the essential imagination that was supposed to go with such hopes.

The sentence of a boring, unextraordinary life was close at my heels. It was the late sixties, and I learned to play the violin and ate brie as an ignorant preteen while the entire world changed.

I didn’t even realise how close I came to not dodging the bullet.

* * *

_Interview #173: November, 1978_  


The locals are protective of him, sending me to the wrong directions, and I end up walking up and down the main street of Machias, Maine, population one thousand and then some. Someone says that he lives near Little Bay, someone says that no, no, he’s by Great Bay, and someone is kind enough to give me their grandson’s bike, and I cycle up and down icy countryside roads in the blizzard, nearly dying five times as the pine trees sway in the snowy wind.

At the end of the day, I end up sleeping on the couch of the local reverend. There is no hotel or inn in Machias, and I keep rubbing my hands, trying to get some warmth into them. The couch is lumpy, the reverend’s Great Dane sleeps by the fire where it’s warmer, and my bag is full of notes and drafts, and I try not to feel dispirited. Not when I’m this close.

“Does he ever come to church?” I ask the reverend over the simple porridge breakfast the next day.

“No,” he says. “Never.”

I write it down.

* * *

It’s 1971. I’m thirteen years old and I’m doing my chemistry homework in Father’s study late in the evening. I’m not supposed to be there, but I like his big leather chair, comforting in his absence. And, truthfully, I know Father would let me. Mother is at a society gathering, and Hattie left when I turned ten. We still have some help come by a few times a week and they call me ‘sir’. I’ve stopped bothering to learn their names.

In less than six months, Father will be put in jail for fraud, and the government takes the house, they take the car, they take the pool, and once Father is inside, he and my mother sort out their divorce, and after that Mother never talks about Father, not ever, we both pretend he died, I guess, and Mother and I will have to move into a small apartment in a dodgy neighbourhood, but not yet. We don’t know any of this yet.

So now I’m half-curious and half-terrified of the old kingdom that I know I will inherit: Father’s business. Then I will get to sit in this chair and say things like, “Adam, this is a grown up meeting” or “That offer is unacceptable, you tell Houston to stick it up you know where!”

I don’t question that future because it’s the only future. There are no alternatives, no –

I hear a sudden burst of music. Loud music. Electric music.

Odd. You never hear that in this house.

I push the chair back and wander out, seeing the doors of the sitting room parted. Maybe the TV is on because Whiskers stepped on the remote that I accidentally left on the couch after enjoying the cartoons, but when I get to the doorway, I see the black, blank face of the TV.

And the new boy. What’s-his-name. The one that washes the car. And he’s by the record player, nodding to the music, smoking a cigarette that smells oddly bitter and not like a cigarette or a cigar at all.

“Excuse me,” I say, but he doesn’t hear. A sudden drum part comes on, and he groans and his head rolls back in what must be pleasure. “Excuse me!” I say, louder.

He starts and looks my way. His pupils are dilated and he grins happily. “Sorry, kid.” My eyes narrow. “Sir. I mean. Sorry, kid sir.”

“What are you doing?” I enquire as you do in a situation like this. I place my hands on my hips demandingly, acting like I’m seventy when I haven’t even had my first pubic hair yet (not that I know this right then, it’s all very foggy in my mind – girls and how all of that actually works).

The guy looks at the record player dreamily, listening to the song and the singer. “I think he’s telling me the meaning of life.”

He tosses me the LP cover, and I catch it clumsily. It reads _The Followers_ in the top left corner. The cover is consisted of splotches of different dark colours. The name doesn’t mean anything to me. I know Frank Sinatra and Franz Joseph Liszt (a Hungarian, not a Pole, sadly), and I conclude that this must be _pop_ music, like The Beatles who I think worshipped Satan, and I say, “You can’t play this pop music. I’m busy doing my homework.”

“Pop? _Pop?!_ ” he says, scandalised. “Fuck, sir. Sit down and listen.”

And he grabs my shoulders and forces me to sit down on the couch. Unnerved by his unorthodox behaviour, I sit there, not sure what to do or say now that my authority’s been compromised. I hope that Mother comes home soon. He sits down next to me, still smoking that awful smelling cigarette of his – I consider telling him that his tobacco’s gone off the way milk does – and he keeps nodding to the music and gasping and jeering and saying, “Oh my god, I’ve never heard anything like this!”

After a while, I get tired of eyeing him suspiciously and start listening to the music instead. And I’ve never heard anything like it either.

The man on the LP sings, “You have to be reborn, you have to be rebo-o-o-o-orn,” reminding me of my dre-e-e-e-eams, and a chill runs down my spine, and my ears pick up, and then I am concentrating on the music with all my might. We listen to the album twice.

The pothead (as I will come to realise in my first rock concert a few years later) gets fired a week after that for stealing my mother’s jewellery. I find the debut album of The Followers in the kitchen pantry. He forgot it there in his hurry to get out. I smuggle the record to my bedroom.

It’s 1971, and I’m late to the party, but my change and my life and my dreams all start then.

The needle drops down onto the vinyl. A small static hiss is followed by the dark, electric boom of guitar.

It’s 1971, I’m thirteen years old, and I start growing out my hair.

* * *

_Interview #7: July, 1978_  


“He’s a cunt. Don’t flinch, man! Write it down! C-U-N-T,” Brent Wilson spells out, leaning over a desk in his office in a real-estate company in San Diego in California in the United States. His eyes narrow and he makes sure I write down ‘cunt’. “Good boy.” He leans back and straightens his tie.

“The, uh.” I clear my throat. Try to wrap my mind around this _actually_ being Brent Wilson, the former bassist and keyboardist of The Followers, the man of many talents. “The last time we met you had long hair.”

“We’ve met?” His hand absently brushes through the trimmed locks that carefully imitate the shape of his head. “When was that?”

“Four years ago. On your last tour.”

“Oh.”

I met you. I met you _five_ times that summer, and you don’t even remember? We shared a cigarette once, and I had never smoked before and my lungs were on fire and my eyes watered, but I forced myself not to cough, and it was the best moment of my _life_ , standing outside the hotel sharing a cigarette with you, Brent Wilson, and you said something immortal like, ‘Music is the energy of life’, and I swooned, and you patted my shoulder and left with one of the groupies.

I hang my head in disappointment and focus on my notes. “So, uh.” A long silence ensues that Brent doesn’t fill. I scratch the side of my head. “Anything else?”

“Nope.”

“You wouldn’t describe Ryan in any other way?”

“No.”

“I just, uh. Don’t know if I can actually say the C-word in my book.”

“Censorship.” Brent grins wickedly. “If you want to write a book about Ryan Ross, you’ll need to censor it a _lot_.”

He knows a million things I don’t. The vastness of my project is slowly dawning on me.

“Listen, kid.” He checks his wristwatch. _Brent Wilson_ owns and wears and uses a wristwatch. “We’re closing in half an hour.” We. We. He’s a real estate agent. “Wait for me outside and I’ll buy you dinner. I’ll answer your questions and I’ll be honest. Or, well.” He breaks into a twisted smile. “As honest as I can be.”

* * *

Ryan’s living room in Machias, Maine has a huge grandfather clock and it ticks. And tocks. Ticks. And tocks. The place doesn’t look like how I thought it’d look like: all dazzling and mysterious and luxurious. No, the house and room look old-fashioned, full of wooden furniture and squeaky floorboards and an odd smell like- like seawater and fresh air and dead fish.

The Dictaphone is in my pocket, but somehow I don’t have the guts to pull it out.

Ryan – although I know him as ‘Mr. Ross, Mr. Ross, sir!’ yelled at his back as he vanishes into a limo without a look back – is looking more impatient by the minute.

I organise my notes even further. “I just, um. I need to.”

* * *

Rewind a short six months. It’s the spring of 1978, and my hair is short. Shorter, anyway. It’s a part of growing up and looking good in the graduation pictures. I throw my hat into the air, jumping around in my black robes, clutching the roll of parchment with _Adam Theodore Siska, Bachelor of Arts_ written on it.

Mom looks at me in a weird way: pride, maybe? Or a still lingering shock that I went for Music, and not in an Ivy League school like I was supposed to, but in the mediocre, standard Saint Xavier College, Chicago? Mom miles at me nevertheless. She’s caught up in a dream my father and her made up for me when I was a baby, a more glorified life, one that crashed down when the money and love disappeared. My friends call out, “Well done, Sisky!” and Mom scowls at the nickname that I acquired during my teenage years. It’s not my friends’ fault: they didn’t name me and I didn’t name me either.

“Well, Adam,” Mom says with a smile that’s half patience and half genuine pride, “now you have your degree in... Music.”

Mother wanted me to study Business Relations, insisted that business was in my blood. My blood? I said! Father’s in jail! How’s that for blood?

I’d said the F word. I heard her cry herself to sleep that night, and I decided to be kinder to her. We’ve been increasingly kind, the last few years. I love her.

I think back to my room, to my comfy bed and the poster I keep opposite it. My friends have joked that it’s jerk off material, but it’s _not_ , thank you very much. But when I close my eyes, I see the four of them there: all wearing different clothes – Ryan in one of his official and mysterious well-fitted suits, Spencer in his 60s embracing vests, Brent, well, wearing whatever he could find but that’s what makes him so _amazing_ , and Joe in a brightly coloured one-piece that’s just so rock’n’roll. The guys. My guys.

“What do you want to do now?” Mom asks me, not unkindly. You’ve graduated – get a job! Stop dreaming, and get a job.

“I’ve been working on something,” I say, thinking of the preliminary research I’ve done: chronologies, magazine articles, all in a box under my bed. Mom arches an inquisitive eyebrow.

“Sisky! Well done, man!” Some cheering, and I grin and wave at my fellow graduates.

Mom makes a ‘tut’ with her tongue.

I clutch my hard earned degree and kiss life as expected goodbye.

* * *

13th of August, 1972. I’m not too young to go to a rock concert. I am not.

I cry and I beg and I cry some more because my life will _end_ if I don’t get to go, and it’s _just_ a rock concert, and no, I _won’t_ do anything improper, Mom, like engage in an orgy (what _is_ an orgy?) or stick a needle into my vein (do they have blood donation points at rock concerts?), and grudgingly she lets me go with one of my new school friends.

I’ve been listening to The Followers and King Crimson and Pink Floyd and ELO, and _all_ these bands no one else ever seems to have heard of, but The Followers are my favourite without a doubt. All the other bands are English – that spark of genius on this side of the pond seems to be limited to Ryan Ross, Joe Trohman, Spencer Smith and Brent Wilson. Four extraordinary men, having been born different from the rest of us. And I – Adam T. Siska – get to see them as they come to Chicago in support of their amazing, incredible, ground-breaking second album _Her House_. I don’t understand why they’re not more famous than what they are – out of my record collection (a humble twenty items) they make the best music.

I listen to the bands loud, loud, loud when Mom cries at night. The neighbours bang on the walls and threaten to call the police.

A poster advertising the gig is in the shop front of the record store where they recognise me by now. “Hey, kid, what you buying this week?”

I usually go for whatever Ryan Ross has recommended in a most recent interview, spending all my hard earned money on it. It’s not ideal to stuff shelves in the corner shop after school, but I need to make money somehow. I persuade the record shop owner to give me the concert poster, and I put it on my wall since I can’t fit it to my Followers scrapbook. I subscribe to Creem and The Rolling Stone (I live beyond my means, Mom says), and I got a record player for Christmas so that I can finally listen to records in my bedroom. My friends call me strange, and I say, “When you’re strange, no one remembers your name,” but they never get the reference.

Someone like Ryan Ross would. The way he talks in interviews – the ones I’ve managed to get my greedy little hands on – you’d think that he’s listened to every band _ever_. Yeah, he’d get The Doors reference no problem.

But I don’t know what to expect when I first see The Followers, 13th of August, 1972, in Chicago where Mom and I moved a year previously. Carve the date into my skin: everything ch-ch-changes. (Ryan would get that one too.) Goodbye Jerzy and Jersey! Hello Lake Michigan! Hello the opportunity to start anew, where the high school kids don’t know that I used to live in a big house with two maids! But nothing ever changes except the scenery arrangements, someone once said. Or might have said. Or will say.

I comb my hair back and I comb my hair forth and I comb my hair to the side, and remain unsatisfied. I keep it to the side.

My friend’s big sister comes along with her boyfriend because we’re too young to go on our own, and they disappear quickly to make out in a dark corner. It’s a venue of a few thousand people, and it’s the last time I _ever_ see The Followers play in a venue so small. They’re on their way to fame. They don’t know that. I don’t know that. Inevitability in the face of true talent knows that.

And it’s so exciting, the buzz of it, the chattering, the restless stomping of feet. A sense of unity engulfs me: on my right a group of guys are talking about Spencer’s drumming techniques, on my left two girls are saying, ‘Oh my god, oh my god’ and ‘Do you think he’d look our way if I flashed my breasts?’

We all love these guys.

My friend is bored and tugging my sleeve, saying he doesn’t like the still air, and he goes to the bathroom and comes back high after “someone offered me a funny cigarette.” He starts feeling nauseous and rushes back to the toilets. A guy behind me laughs and says, “Man, your friend took some bad grass. Here, try this. Mine’s _sublime_.”

I’ve always been a fan of the word sublime – subliiiime, the way it rolls off your tongue, and it’s practically onomatopoeic, too – and so I think to myself that, hell, it’s a Followers concert, I might as well smoke some tobacco.

It’s not tobacco.

After I stop coughing, I don’t really care that it’s not.

And then.

Then.

I wish I had the words to describe what it feels like to have The Followers come on. Brent first, followed by Spencer, and then Joe, and the crowd goes wild, explodes, erupts, but I hold my breath because no, _no_ , that will not do, and the mic in the middle stands empty, and Joe’s already got his guitar wrapped around himself, and he strums a chord, flashing us a stunning smile and then we hear crash bang cymbal cymbal crash bang, and only then does the last quarter of The Followers arrive.

It’s funny when you first see a person you’ve only seen pictures of, and then, suddenly, they appear in front of you, flesh and blood and breathing, ten rows ahead and centre stage, a bony wrist lifted in an awkward hello. And I can’t look away. Ryan’s tall and too thin and wearing a smart suit and he’s clean shaven, but he’s _scruffy_ , somehow he just _is_ , like a rough diamond, and he sings the first line, monotonous and doomed, and he sounds like a prophet. The crowd loses it.

I don’t look away once.

* * *

_Interview #8, July, 1978_  


Dinner with Brent turns out to be a blood-oozing experience of beef in a steakhouse, and Brent talks with his mouth full, ordering beers every six minutes. “Where was I?” he asks frequently, and I say ‘Woodstock’ or ‘opening for Pink Floyd’ or ‘Ryan’s twentieth birthday’.

He likes talking about it, that much is obvious. “You know, _I_ wrote that song,” he says of every single Followers song and a few of other people’s too. I write down, ‘Wants to relive the glory days’, make sure that Brent can’t actually see. The Dictaphone is on the table between us, making sure no gem of information is lost. When he finishes the steak, I realise I’m running out of time with him and turn to the end of his professional relationship with my subject.

“Ryan destroyed the band,” Brent says and takes a long sip of his beer. Something inside me sinks. “He thought he was better than us. Wanted special treatment. Thought we were too ordinary for him to talk to. Asshole,” he mutters bitterly and stares into his nearly empty bottle.

“But I thought the, uh. The crash caused for the band to –”

“Yeah, well that’s what we told people, didn’t we? But no, here’s the truth: the band was done before we ever hit that car.”

“Right,” I manage. A sickening disappointment settles in my guts, feeling like I’ve just been told a second time that my parents are divorcing. But that’s what we’ve all thought: the bus crash made... I don’t know, made the guys reassess their lives, and they realised that The Followers wasn’t what they wanted to do anymore. Not because they hated each other and not because of the music. It was an era thing. Ryan and Joe both got hurt pretty badly, didn’t they? We thought they were getting better. Taking time out. They still loved each other, right? They were still a band, our band, weren’t they?

No.

I stare down at my half-eaten ribs, feeling as gutted as a pig carcass somewhere out there.

“And then, of course, there was that entire Brendon episode.” Brent scoffs loudly. The name rings a bell, and I try to think through articles and interviews but don’t know where to place the name. A few more months, Brendon Roscoe will be everywhere – but not yet, not yet.

“I don’t know if –”

“Well,” Brent says, leaning over the table slightly. “This is where censorship comes in, man. See, Brendon played for the other team. He got Ryan into it.” His eyes widen scandalously.

“Oh. Um. Wow. Okay.” I flash him an appreciative smile for this piece of gossip. Brent looks pleased with himself, and I scribble down, ‘Ryan became a communist? Who is Brendon?’ As an afterthought, I add, ‘Communism = Followers break up?’ So many leads to follow. For all the answers Brent is giving me, I’ve got three pages of new questions and people to talk to. “I didn’t know Ryan had those tendencies,” I then say.

“Oh, none of us did. Trust me.” Brent lights a postprandial cigarette. “You know who you should talk to? Jac. I’ve got her address. She and I meet up sometimes.”

“That’s nice,” I smile, relieved that there’s at least one name I can pin down easily enough: Jac Vanek – Ryan’s notorious ex-girlfriend.

Brent puffs out smoke, and the little boy in me wonders why I worshipped him for so many years. Turns out that he’s just an embittered real estate agent living in San Diego.

* * *

“Adam?” Andy the Roadie repeats, pushing glasses up his nose. Andy is rock ‘n roll on legs: covered in tattoos, long rock hair, jeans too low on his hips, and he clearly just doesn’t give a fuck. “No, in all seriousness. Adam?” he repeats, causing the few other fans bumming by the Followers tour bus to snicker. I wish I hadn’t so persistently tried to introduce myself.

“Father thought it was a good biblical name,” I mumble with the confidence of a fourteen-year-old.

“Oh, did Father now?” Andy asks, and my cheeks tingle with shame. I take a step back to disappear back into the crowd, back into the lowest slot in the hierarchy.

This is how it works. I made a sketch:

It’s a dog eat dog world, and I had to cut off those higher up on the list just to say hi to Andy who’s smoking pot, and I’ve disturbed the status quo and failed miserably, only embarrassing myself in the process, and as I try to dissolve into the background somehow, Andy says, “Nah, come here, kid. Come here.”

I boldly approach him again as the others look on. They’re all older and cooler than me, and I so desperately want to consider myself as one of them.

“Adam. Come on, what’s next? It’s gotta get better from there.”

I scratch my neck. “Adam Theodore –” Andy flinches, “– Siska.”

“Fucking unfortunate,” he says, takes in a drag. His bushy eyebrows knit together. “Well, what about Sisky?”

The next day when I go back to school, I refuse to answer to anything else.

* * *

_Interview #13: July, 1978_  


“A biography about Ryan?” Jac asks, laughing. She’s... not at all like I remember her, which is with revealing clothes, wild ‘I’ve just had sex’ hair, up in everyone’s business with two tons of eye makeup. I’d see her hanging out with the band or following Ryan or calling some female fan a pushy slut. Her hair’s still long and blonde, but it comes down to her shoulders neatly in a straight veil. She’s wearing a modest, red dress that offers no cleavage. Her personality, I suppose, comes through in the hat that she’s wearing: tilted to the left side of her head, black and fancy-looking with pieces of glass stuck to it somehow. Like something the Queen Mother might wear to a funeral.

I’m sitting in Jac’s living room: it’s been decorated well. There were pictures of her with musicians out in the hall: David Bowie, Elton John, Art Garfunkel, Joe Trohman, Brent Wilson, Spencer Smith... but no Ryan Ross.

Guess it wasn’t an amiable break up.

“Why would you want to write a book about him?” she asks.

“He is, uh, he is one of the most influential artists of our time.”

“He’s no Bob Dylan or Elvis Presley.”

“Isn’t he? In his own way?” I ask. “In his own genre, in his – for _this_ generation, I mean.”

“Christ, yet another fool wanting to get into Ryan’s pants,” she sighs, and I feel insulted. Here’s someone who’s had sex with Ryan Ross. Repeatedly. I met plenty of girls claiming it, all with wilder stories than the next. But Jac’s actually done it. I don’t know why it’s one of the first things I think of, but there’s something smotheringly sexual about Ryan, in the way he walks and in the way he talks. No wonder all the girls were always in love with him. Him or Joe. Man, there was nothing sadder for a seventeen-year-old kid in a Followers fan crowd than falling for girls who only wanted Ryan or Joe. Us boys all would have hated the band hadn’t we loved them so much.

“Very little is known about his life,” I argue. “I’ve got- plenty of this scattered information, but there are so many questions unanswered. About his childhood, his youth, how he became who he is. So I’m writing a book. I think people want to know. People _deserve_ to know, especially now that –” I stop to take a breath. I suddenly feel my heart ache. “Now that he’s no longer around.”

“Sad little puppy,” Jac says, patronising as ever. She sighs and takes another sip of her drink. Orange juice, she said. I can smell the vodka, however. “Brent sent you here?” she asks, and I nod. “Well, then. Alright.”

* * *

Because it feels like death.

You’d think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.

It fell down on me, scorching hot.

Because Ryan, he’d just finished a world tour: North America, Europe, Asia. I’d spent the entire summer listening to _Wolf’s Teeth_ , and I had been to as many of the US shows as I could afford, and they were going to tour more in the fall, they had promised. And I knew I was about to start my senior year in college, but I would find the money and make the time and hit the road again.

I was listening to night-time radio, singing along to all the songs I knew. And then the radio host said, “We’ve just received a telegram,” and he sounded oddly choked up. Someone’s died, I thought, someone’s died again. And he said, “I don’t know how to break this to you guys, but Ryan Ross of The Followers and more recently performing with his backup band The Whiskeys –” And I was dying, I was dead, if Ryan, if – “is renouncing music. He’s retiring, man. How old is he? Not even thirty. Is that any time to retire?”

No.

No, it is not.

You don’t do that. It makes no _sense_. You don’t quit when you’re more famous than you’ve ever been, when everyone wants another piece of you. That’s when you keep going. Had he had a nervous breakdown? Was he ill? No. He just quit. He just walked away.

One little press release, The Whiskeys dissolving, and no one knew what happened to Ryan Ross.

And I lay on my bed, curled up, staring into space like I was dead, dead, dead. They put on _708_ despite it being over eight minutes and not at all radio friendly, and I listened as Ryan sang the angriest song he ever wrote. The saddest one. The best one.

No tour. No nothing.

College started again. I kept waiting for news of him, anything, something – flipped through music magazines in vain, and all I ever came across was a short article before Christmas with the title ‘What Happened to Ryan Ross?’

No one knew.

He moved. He wasn’t in New York anymore.

Fans didn’t know if he was even in the country. All these nasty rumours of him having died were floating around.

I couldn’t bring myself to believe them. He had to be alive. He had to be _somewhere_ , doing _something_.

“But I don’t know where to start looking,” I told one of my Music major friends, Vincent. “I mean, do I just go and knock on every door in America?”

“Sisky, man,” he said, passing the joint back as we lay on the floor of his room, _Boneless_ playing in the background. We’d have to switch the record over soon. “You have to go back, man. You can’t know where someone’s gone if you don’t know where they’ve come from.”

He was right, I realised.

Vincent was right.

Ryan Ross, who we all knew so well, who we all knew so little. I recalled him back on that small Chicago stage in 1972, six years prior, when I saw him for the first time. How everything he did seemed like a sign of things he knew but we didn’t, how he was wrapped up in mystery.

I could find him. I just needed to find out everything about him, because we as fans deserved it, because he left us in the dark. Someone had to shed some light.

Vincent specialised in church music and was reading a biography of Saint Augustine.

Ryan was no saint, but he was holy. And I could write a book about him, too.


End file.
